Bad Deployment

I knew when I decided to take the task of painting the ork horde that I’d hit the wall. Well, that happened about two weeks ago. I’m still making progress, but not nearly at the pace I was. It has become an effort to make myself paint. I even took a week break just to see if it would recharge the batteries but all that did was make it harder to get back into. The biggest problem here is that I didn’t stick to my original plan. To begin, I wanted to avoid hitting the wall by varying my tasks. I’d do one squad of shoota boyz from start to finish at a time. That alone should have given me enough breaks to see me through. What happened instead is that I hit a groove where I was rocking out those orks in record time and instead of breaking when I should have, I instead pushed through.

That’s left me with 60 shoota boyz that have been basecoated. I can’t play with them because I don’t like playing with models that have any paint on them until it’s sealed. I realize the chance that the paint is going to chip with a few games in minimal, but that’s just how I am. I have a feeling that if I played again (as it’s been over a month) it would feed my desire to paint. As it stands, the lack of painting (and my own quirk) is keeping me from playing.

It also doesn’t help that somewhere along the way I lost my perspective on the quality that a horde like this should be painted. Initially, I told myself that with this many troops on the board, most details don’t matter. Clean lines, good color variety, and good faces were all I focused on at the beginning, knowing that the dip would hide a lot of bleed-over mistakes and the sheer number of units I would field would help avoid scrutiny.  My mantra was “Perfection is the enemy of done.”

That didn’t last long. I found myself going back and fixing the little mistakes I said I would leave. I don’t know if it’s a pride thing or some sort of mini-painting OCD, but I was decidedly no longer speed painting. I even started using some washes even though I knew I was going to dip the minis (to be fair I was washing to change color tone more than to shade). This has left me with models that are already easily tabletop quality. Most people would probably just forget about the dip and be happy, but I want even more shading. So I’m going to press on.

Sixty boyz are done out of the total of 90. I think I can take a deep breath and spring to the end so I’m going to post a deadline you all with have to hold me to. I want to have all three units completely done by the end of October. That’s painted, dipped, and based. This is my goal. If you all see me online in the evening it’s your responsibility to ask me why I’m not painting.